A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
When distant Corsica appears across the evening sea, an old traveler recalls a noblewoman who gave up society for lasting love.
A dying Norman farmer entrusts his son with an address, a secret household, and an obligation no legal will records.
After four years at sea, a sailor returns to Marseille and meets a woman whose questions turn a night of celebration into dread.
A wealthy, childless couple offers two poor farming families money and security in exchange for adopting a son.
A severe priest sets out to confront his niece’s secret lover, but the moonlit countryside challenges his certainty.
Spring fever draws a young man toward a stranger on the Seine, until another passenger offers an urgent warning about love.
An aging actress welcomes a traveler into the flower-covered villa where she lives with portraits of the men who loved her.
A confirmed skeptic of love recalls the moonlit boat ride that briefly unsettled all his carefully reasoned certainty.
During a winter retreat, a resourceful French lieutenant risks his mission to carry a freezing young woman through enemy-held country.
After a murdered child is found in a village wood, the mayor leads a search that finds no culprit but cannot quiet the countryside.
A hunter in a frozen marsh witnesses a wild bird's devotion and finds his sport transformed by the sight.
A man who fears his own hands demonstrates a power over minds and objects that leaves his friend unsure whether either of them is sane.
A jealous man insists he is sane while recounting the obsession that made him turn against his lover and her horse.
In an asylum, a beautiful woman hides imaginary scars while a doctor explains the guilt behind her delusion.
A provincial town crowns its shyest young man as a model of virtue, then watches its solemn civic experiment take an unruly turn.
A major turns military discipline on an entire fortified town for the sake of one forbidden meeting with a married woman.
A Norman brothel closes for a country confirmation, carrying its lively household from familiar commerce into an unexpected sacred occasion.
A kindhearted coachman adopts an unwanted dog, but her devotion and unruly habits bring him to an impossible choice.
During the Prussian occupation, a young Frenchwoman is drawn into an officers’ supper where humiliation sharpens into resistance.
At a Twelfth Night dinner, a guest asks how the household’s quiet companion came to live there and what her place has cost her.
In colonial Algeria, a traveler’s affair with a married woman leads him from sensual confidence into a reckless encounter under her husband’s roof.
A forester’s fearless daughter faces six lost Prussian soldiers alone in a snowbound forest house.
In a quiet Paris garden, a young law student befriends two forgotten dancers who still inhabit the manners of another century.
A wandering painter befriends an eccentric Englishwoman on the Normandy coast and discovers the feeling beneath her reserve.
